An Oracle White Paper June 2009 An Overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Executive Overview... 1 Introduction... 1 The Build Versus Buy Decision... 3 Solving the Data Access Challenge... 5 Solving the Insight Delivery Challenge... 7 Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Overview... 8 Oracle Financial Analytics... 8 Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics... 9 Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics... 10 Oracle Project Analytics... 11 Oracle Human Resources Analytics... 12 Oracle Sales Analytics... 14 Oracle Price Analytics... 15 Oracle Marketing Analytics... 16 Oracle Loyalty Analytics... 17 Oracle Service Analytics... 18 Oracle Call Center Telephony Analytics... 20 Conclusion... 21
Executive Overview No longer a luxury item, business intelligence (BI) applications are required to optimize corporate profits and performance. The most valuable BI systems pull data from across the enterprise and present information to users in a meaningful way to improve decisionmaking. This white paper explores the advantages of investing in prebuilt BI applications. It then provides an overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications the leading BI applications suite and summarizes the analytic applications that provide best-practice metrics and reports for eleven different functional areas. Introduction The nature of successful business is to grow revenues and increase profitability while tightly managing costs. At the end of the 1990 s, enterprises addressed these challenges by implementing transactional enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications to streamline operations and increase efficiencies. These front- and back-office systems optimized processes and reduced costs while also increasing the amount of data about the enterprise and its core competencies. Today, companies realize that the information locked in enterprise and legacy systems is incredibly valuable. Accessing and understanding this information improves a company s ability to manage costs and grow margins. However, the information must be complete, current, and adequate to answer critical business questions. And most organizations struggle to access and extract the right data from multiple systems and to deliver insight to the right person at the right time. Analytic applications can be the answer to the data access and insight delivery challenges. The most effective analytic applications pull data from multiple enterprise sources and shed insight into the status and effectiveness of business operations. For example, a financial analytic application can track actual performance versus budget or 1
measure the profitability of customers or products. A sales analytic application can track the size of the pipeline and identify the most profitable opportunities. A supply chain analytic application can optimize inventory levels, predict product fulfillment needs, and identify order backlog issues. While enterprise applications are required to run the business, analytic applications are mandatory to make sense of it. Today, most organizations recognize the need for analytic applications. They understand they must mine their data for timely insights that can lead to smarter decisions, better plans, and more empowered workers. But two questions remain. First, the organization must determine whether those analytic capabilities can be built in-house or should be purchased from a packaged application vendor. Second, organizations must ensure that the solution they select is the best at pulling data from multiple systems around the enterprise and delivering useful information to decision-makers. This white paper will highlight the benefits of prebuilt analytic applications and then provide an overview of the most comprehensive and market-leading analytic applications available Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. 2
"When we set out to implement Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, we wanted dashboards in people's hands in four months and we achieved that objective. We anticipate that building our own solution from scratch would have taken twice as long to deploy in comparison to these applications. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications met our immediate needs and will grow with us as our corporatewide reporting environment." Todd Elsberg, Director of Business Operations, Equinix The Build Versus Buy Decision Building a custom data warehouse and BI solution is a huge project. It involves creating both a data management architecture (consisting of a data warehouse, staging area, and data marts) as well as a data access architecture (consisting of reports, analytics, dashboards, and scorecards). For large enterprises, teams of up to 50 people are required to gather requirements; architect solutions; document metadata; train and support users; and purchase, configure, and integrate a wide variety of tools. 1 Expertise in consolidating and integrating data from heterogeneous systems and applications as well as reconciling and validating data quality is also required. In fact, the average data warehousing project costs $1.1 million and takes 10 months to deliver, while a data mart project costs $544,000 and takes six months to deliver. 2 In addition, these systems do not deliver insight and information to the majority of the company s decision makers. They generally only provide a departmental view of the data. Packaged analytic applications, on the other hand, offer 1) a faster time to value, 2) enhanced functionality, and 3) a single BI foundation for the enterprise. First, packaged analytic applications drastically reduce the time and cost to deploy a BI solution. One leading BI implementer has estimated that the cost of deploying a custom solution is typically 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the cost estimate of deploying prebuilt applications. 3 Properly designed analytic packages come with an integrated set of tools, data schemas, business views, and predefined reports and dashboards that significantly accelerate the time it takes to get a BI solution up and running. When deployed correctly, leading packaged analytic applications can shrink the time required to complete back-end ETL mapping; design the data warehouse 1 Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Research, Closing the Loop in a Consolidated World: Evaluating Packaged Analytic Applications, January 2009. 2 Ibid. 3 The Business Intelligence Consulting Group, The Great Debate: Buy Versus Build, 2007. 3
data model; define metrics and dashboards; and roll out the solution and train business users. As Figure 1 illustrates, Oracle s packaged analytic applications can compress the entire system s time to value. Figure 1. Using Oracle Business Intelligence Applications significantly reduces the amount of time needed to complete each of the four steps in building and deploying a BI solution. Second, a robust packaged analytic application can deliver functionality and benefits that would be difficult or impossible for you to reproduce on your own. Although these features and functions may not be the main driver in the selection process, some of them may prove useful as your company becomes more analytically sophisticated. 4 Packaged applications provide an endto-end view of corporate performance and deliver role-based views for employees of all levels in most departments. When using Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, you can also leverage functional and industry best practices that are built into via reports, dashboards, metrics, and guided analytics. Finally, packaged applications like Oracle Business Intelligence Applications allow organizations to deploy BI on a small scale for a single department and then expand seamlessly to support other departments using the same model and platform, delivering a consistent view of enterprise information. This is in contrast to the distinct data marts built for each department s custom solution none of which uses the same data model or dimensions. The build-your-own 4 Metricsphere, Justifying Business Intelligence Applications: A White Paper Exploring the Build vs. Buy Argument for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, 2008. 4
approach often creates silos of information that must eventually be replaced or consolidated into a single enterprise data warehouse at great expense. 5 The value of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications compared to traditional, in-house BI solutions is clear: quicker time to deploy, less overall cost, an enterprise view of data, role-based views for all employees, closed-loop processing, and built-in best practices. However, not all packaged applications are the same. To get the most from your implementation, you need a complete analytic application that can collect and make sense of data from across the enterprise. That data must then be packaged up and delivered to users in a format that enables them to make the best possible decisions. Solving the Data Access Challenge Most organizations struggle to obtain timely and relevant data from their enterprise systems. The reasons are twofold. First, the volume and the complexity of enterprise data have increased exponentially. To compound the problem, that data is often fragmented across many disparate systems and departments. Second, the traditional BI systems used by many organizations cannot provide timely, cross-value chain insight nor deliver it to large numbers of front-line users where it has the greatest impact. While other BI vendors place the expensive costs of integration on your IT staff or on outside consultants Oracle assumes the integration burden so you can focus on higher-value work. Oracle s BI piece will help us create a wrapper around all of our strategic platforms particularly around ERP in the back office and CRM in the front office [both also Oracle platforms]. Business units will be able to use the data those systems contain to develop information for analysis and reporting to upper management. Chris Siebert, Global Director of Integration, Reporting, and Analytics, Ingersoll Rand 6 Prebuilt Integrations and Adapters Oracle Business Intelligence Applications were developed with the expectation that data resides in multiple places and that enterprises use multiple packaged and custom-built operational applications. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications offer prebuilt integration to the Oracle family of transactional applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. This includes support for Oracle E-Business 5 Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Research, Closing the Loop in a Consolidated World: Evaluating Packaged Analytic Applications, January 2009. 6 Ventana Research, Making One from Many: Standardized BI and Best Practices Help Ingersoll Rand Become a Single Global Entity, 2009. 5
Suite s flexfields, PeopleSoft Enterprise s department trees and department security, Siebel CRM s customer segmentation structure, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne s category codes. Oracle has utilized its extensive knowledge of the workflows and data models within each of these transactional application families to provide the quickest path to information. Only Oracle Business Intelligence Applications leverage the unique roles, profiles, and security setups of each application family so business users can securely and contextually drill all the way to a transactional level of detail. Complementary to the prebuilt adapters for Oracle applications, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications also provide universal adapters to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from non-oracle or legacy applications such as QAD or SAP. In addition, call center operational information such as interactive voice response (IVR) and computer telephony integration (CTI) data, Web logs, and flat files can be accessed and analyzed. Information can pulled from these multiple source systems and be integrated across multiple Oracle Business Intelligence Applications to give a single view across the organization. Open to All Data Sources Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are built on the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus platform a next-generation analytics platform and data model that fully leverages existing data warehouse and BI investments. Using a metadata-centric architecture, these applications are designed to support the growing needs of the business user while minimizing IT maintenance and administration. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are built using standards-based technology, enabling easy integration with existing IT environments. They support all leading relational database management system products, security architectures such as LDAP or external tables, and commercial and custom enterprise transactional applications. Organizations realize the benefits of a packaged BI application faster time to value, lower total cost of ownership, and built-in best practices while also having the ability to extend those solutions or build custom BI applications on a common architecture. Moreover, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications support large numbers of concurrent users, multiterabyte data sets, and the largest enterprise implementations. By providing prebuilt integrations and adapters and by being open to all data sources, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications solve the first major challenge facing BI systems: accessing enterprisewide information from multiple and disparate data sources. 6
The deployment of Oracle was a must-do for Wind River to reach the next level of growth and efficiency. By choosing best-ofbreed SOA and BI software for our current and future business systems, we can now deliver even greater service to our customers and focus on implementing new, powerful processes for our company. Scott Fenton, CIO, Wind River Systems Solving the Insight Delivery Challenge Traditional BI systems struggle to deliver appropriate and well-timed data to employees who make critical decisions every day. Data presented in custom reports is often too old to be useful and may only be presented to executives. If your front-line decision makers cannot access the information they need, they cannot make the best decisions for the company. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that provide timely, fact-based insight into activities across the entire organization. They gather relevant data and aggregate it into the most appropriate metrics and formats for the business user. Because data is pulled from multiple systems, siloed views are eliminated and cross-functional analysis becomes possible. Everyone from executives to front-line employees gets complete and in-context insight that is personalized, relevant, and actionable. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications deliver this extensive business content through dashboards, metrics, alerts, guided analytics, and reports. The user s role and function determine exactly what content is appropriate and should be delivered. By delivering relevant, role-based content to the right business users, you can increase user adoption and ensure that the data is used to enhance business performance. Dashboards and Metrics Traditional BI solutions require users to discover problems manually, and thus problems may go undetected for days or weeks until it is too late to react. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications includes dashboards that deliver powerful financial metrics directly to executives, managers, and analysts in the form of easy-to-read charts, graphs, and tables. The complete environment contains over 500 dashboard pages. Employees can monitor performance, spot deviations, drill down to find the exact problem, and take action to correct it. Alerts and Guided Analytics Critical and emerging issues demand immediate attention. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provide hundreds of prebuilt, guided analytics and workflows. These proactive, event-based, and scheduled alerts are delivered directly to a user s handheld device via e-mail or personalized dashboard. If margins dip below a threshold amount or if customer churn levels 7
spike, alerts will notify the decision-makers and suggest corrective action based on best practices and application process flows. Reports Traditional solutions require managers to wait days or even weeks for specific reports and critical business results. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provides detailed reporting at a greater frequency and to a broader range of users. The complete suite contains more than 3,000 prebuilt reports (with 18,000 data elements and metrics built in, documented, and available for use). Within reports, information such as cost or revenue can be segmented by product, geography, region, or customer so strategies can be fine-tuned. By reducing the time spent compiling and consolidating data, employees can spend more time on analysis. By delivering complete, relevant, and timely business content to decision-makers in easy-tounderstand dashboards, alerts, and reports, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications solve the second major challenge facing BI systems: delivering the right information to the right people in the right format. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Overview The benefit of accessing data from across the enterprise and delivering deep insight directly to business users is faster and more informed decisions that help the organization optimize resources, reduce costs, and improve the effectiveness of front- and back-office activities ranging from sales to human resources (HR) to procurement. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications support eleven different functional areas with best-practice analytics. "With Oracle s prebuilt analytic solutions for sales, marketing, and service, we were able to deploy a powerful BI solution in under three months. Verizon Business employees, across the enterprise, are now empowered with relevant, complete information tailored to their role. Rob Moore, Executive Director, Verizon Oracle Financial Analytics Oracle Financial Analytics provides organizations with better visibility into the factors that drive revenues, costs, and shareholder value. With dashboards that track key performance indicators (KPIs), managers can see how staffing costs and supplier performance correlate with increased revenue and customer satisfaction. Oracle Financial Analytics also offers insight into the general ledger, product or customer profitability, actual performance versus budget, and payables and receivables. As a result, managers are empowered to make the best decisions, close the books faster, and comply with all regulatory laws. Dashboards and alerts allow financial and business managers to monitor financial performance in real-time. Detailed financial reports generated at a greater frequency and delivered to a broader 8
range of users allow managers to understand how their business is performing while there is still time to make adjustments. Oracle Financial Analytics enables companies to more effectively manage their financial performance and improve business by Analyzing detailed, transaction-level data to understand the factors driving revenue, cost, and profitability across business units, geographic locations, sales territories, customers, products, and distribution channels in time to take action Optimizing cash flow through detailed accounts receivable, accounts payable, and inventory analysis Enhancing regulatory reporting to reduce the time it takes to generate periodic financial statements or reports for regulatory compliance to laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Ensuring budget compliance with effective expense controls that deliver expense line details to departmental managers in time to take corrective action Improving cash collections and reducing days sales outstanding (DSO) by identifying slowpaying customers or those with billing issues Figure 2. Oracle Financial Analytics includes prebuilt dashboards that pull information from enterprise systems and provide timely, complete data to corporate decision makers. Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics optimizes an organization s supply-side performance by integrating data from across the enterprise value chain and enabling executives, managers, and frontline employees to make more informed and actionable decisions. Organizations using Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics benefit from increased visibility into corporate expenditures and a complete view of the procure-to-pay process including comprehensive analyses of procurement, supplier performance, supplier payables, and employee expenses. With 9
complete, end-to-end insight into spend patterns and supplier performance, organizations can significantly reduce costs, enhance profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and gain competitive advantage. The solution allows companies to more effectively manage their expenditures and improve business performance by Providing timely direct and indirect spending data to all departments Reducing data collection time with source-specific adapters that extract and transform data from disparate enterprise systems both Oracle and non-oracle-based so managers can spend more time on higher value activities such as analysis Analyzing detailed, transaction-level data to understand the factors driving supplier performance and procurement costs Identifying cost savings across business units, geographic locations, products, and procurement organizations Improving performance by identifying suppliers that price inconsistently or do not adhere to price schedules Figure 3. Powerful dashboards in Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics track spend, supplier performance, procurement performance, and employee expenses. Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics delivers deep customer insight into the order-to-cash process and supply chain including inventory management and finished goods 10
so organizations can make better decisions at each stage of the order lifecycle. Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics enables organizations to assess inventory levels, predict product fulfillment needs before an order has been booked, identify potential order backlog issues, and stay on top of critical accounts receivable and DSO issues. The insights gained from this analysis lead to actionable steps to address short-term issues and provide strategic input into how to transform the supply chain and order management process. Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics enables companies to more effectively manage their customers and improve business performance by Providing timely order, margin, cancellations, discounts, and returns data to operations departments Reducing the time spent compiling, reconciling, and consolidating data from fragmented systems so business users can spend more time analyzing, making proactive decisions, and taking action Improving inventory management for products that consistently get into backlog due to lack of appropriate stock level Enabling effective management of order booking, billing, and backlog Figure 4. Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics includes prebuilt dashboards that pull information from multiple enterprise systems and provide timely, complete data on inventory, orders, and returns to corporate decision makers. Oracle Project Analytics Oracle Project Analytics delivers insight into the financial performance of projects so all team members can seamlessly track the project lifecycle. Oracle Project Analytics provides hundreds of out-of-the-box, standards-based KPIs and reports for project profitability analysis, funding and budgets, cost, revenue, and billing. Information is personalized, relevant, and actionable to 11
improve project performance and profitability. Oracle Project Analytics also delivers crossfunctional analysis including project-based analysis of accounts receivable and accounts payable, invoice-aging analysis, or status of procurement transactions by project. As a result all employees given their level of security can see a personalized, consistent version of the truth and take timely, corrective actions to achieve project objectives. To improve performance of both projects and project portfolios, Oracle Project Analytics allows team members and executives to Monitor projects and control the risks that lead to budget and schedule overruns with out-ofthe box, role-based dashboards Look into a particular program or project and verify how it is performing for a given time period or inception-to-date metrics See past, present, and future performance including estimated metrics at project completion Drill down to detailed cost information for a specific project such as line items sorted by task, expenditure category, resource, or person Figure 5. Oracle Project Analytics monitors project performance so managers can avoid budget and schedule overruns. Oracle Human Resources Analytics Oracle Human Resources Analytics helps organizations manage their talent and analyze workforce performance by integrating critical data from HR, financial, and other enterprise systems. It transforms information silos into comprehensive, timely, and actionable insight into how various factors impact workforce and business performance. Managers and line-of-business managers receive timely information headcount costs and overtime pay all segmented by 12
geography, job category, division, and pay grade. This relevant information is delivered to executives, HR managers, and business line managers through personalized dashboards, metrics, and alerts. As a result, they can understand how workforce factors affect individual departments and can take appropriate actions. Oracle Human Resources Analytics enables companies to more effectively manage and improve their workforce by providing tools that allow decision-makers to Understand compensation s impact on employee performance by correlating salaries with employee performance and turnover Discover the root causes of workforce turnover and analyzing its impact on departmental performance and company costs Optimize staffing levels and compensation to ensure satisfactory delivery of service while maintaining the lowest effective headcount Measure the quality of recruiting efforts, optimize candidate sourcing, analyze the recruitment pipeline, examine the hire-to-retire process efficiency, and monitor vacancies Assess the HR organization s learning offerings and examine how those programs affect employee performance and tenure Figure 6. Oracle Human Resource Analytics allows HR and business managers to understand and adjust the factors driving workplace performance. 13
Oracle Sales Analytics Oracle Sales Analytics provides timely, fact-based insight into the entire sales process. This insight is proactively delivered to salespeople in the field via laptop, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones ensuring they always have the latest information they need to make informed decisions and increase win rates. Sales executives can receive alerts when the pipeline suddenly contracts or territory bookings drop below weekly targets enabling them to take appropriate corrective action. The benefits are faster and more informed decisions that help the sales organization compete more effectively, lower sales costs, and achieve better results. Previously, we were managing our investor services business as though we were looking through a rear-view mirror. With Oracle s BI solutions, we now have 1,700 financial consultants equipped with right-time visibility into their sales pipeline and performance. KG Muthukumar, Director, CRM and Analytics Solutions, Charles Schwab Oracle Sales Analytics includes prebuilt data models, more than 200 metrics, and best practices based on Oracle s experience across thousands of sales force automation implementations. The solution allows companies to increase their revenues and improve business performance by Providing sales professionals with timely insight into sales opportunities, including how long each opportunity has been in the pipeline and the current status of team selling efforts Identifying critical opportunities so executives can assign the appropriate resources to increase the chance of winning Analyzing pipeline opportunities to determine actions required to meet sales targets Highlighting which products and customer segments generate the most revenue Showing which competitors are faced most often and how to win against them Identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities within existing accounts 14
Figure 7. Oracle Sales Analytics provides visibility into the sales pipeline and sales performance. Oracle Price Analytics Oracle Price Analytics provides organizations with valuable insight into product demand, customer price sensitivity, and overall pricing effectiveness. The application allows organizations to analyze and understand important information on product velocity, the impact of discounting, price promotion effectiveness, and product profitability across channels. Performance analysis offers fact-based insight into product, customer, and overall business unit profitability. Drillthrough capabilities provide access to detailed transactional information. Leader-laggard charts and price waterfall analyses compare customer revenue and product performance against forecasts, commitments, and previous time periods. Oracle Price Analytics takes the guesswork out of setting prices by delivering consistent data to managers who can make insight-driven pricing decisions, measure pricing effectiveness, and adjust or correct prices as needed. Oracle Price Analytics enables companies to effectively manage prices, improve margins, and enhance business performance by allowing managers to Understand price drivers by considering the bottom-line impact of all discounts, services, incentives, rebates, and marketing programs Identify pricing improvement opportunities by highlighting underperforming segments and critical areas of revenue leakage Monitor and optimize performance by continuously analyzing and refining pricing programs to maximize margins and profits 15
Find patterns in large sets of pricing data with data mining and predictive technology plug-ins Deliver fine-grained prices and price policies to tailored buyers through analytics that determine price segments with price profiles and suggested price floors and corridors Figure 8. Oracle Price Analytics provides rich performance data that drives better pricing decisions and, in turn, improves an organization s profitability. Oracle Marketing Analytics Oracle Marketing Analytics provides marketing professionals with a new level of business insight by unlocking valuable information hidden in systems across the enterprise. With Oracle Marketing Analytics, marketing professionals can manage and track campaign performance, segment customers with data from enterprisewide systems, retain the most valuable customers, generate demand at the lowest costs, and reduce wasted spend. Access to actionable information drives greater returns on marketing spend, reduces marketing costs, and increases revenuegenerating opportunities. With Oracle, Whirlpool business units are capitalizing on the integration between our BI, call center, and marketing solutions to drive revenue creation and customer loyalty incentives. Previously, our organization spent millions on outside vendors and time to market was slow. Today, we have a solution that enables us to rapidly serve millions of customers worldwide. Thomas Mender, Manager, Sensus BI and Campaign Management, Whirlpool Corporation 16
Oracle Marketing Analytics improves both marketing and overall business performance by Gathering information on customer behavior from transaction history and correlating it with customer lifetime value, churn risk, or behavioral attributes to gain insight into customer clusters and better inform treatment strategies Monitoring metrics critical to contact center campaigns including the number of calls made, average days to follow-up, cross-sell and up-sell effectiveness, and total order revenue so marketers can adapt their marketing approach and remove offers with low response rates Tracking number of emails delivered, open rate, bounce-backs, and offer effectiveness in real time so marketers can measure the effectiveness of email campaigns and fix bottlenecks Providing information on which products customers are likely to buy and insight into which products make effective bundles Aggregating information from various data sources so marketers can calculate, monitor, and build customer investment strategies based on critical metrics such as customer profitability Figure 9. Oracle Marketing Analytics tracks every step of a campaign so marketing professionals can optimize the campaign and ensure that marketing dollars generate measurable returns. Oracle Loyalty Analytics Oracle Loyalty Analytics provides timely, fact-based insight into the entire loyalty program process including the effectiveness of loyalty promotions and partner relationships. It delivers insight that is personalized, relevant, and actionable. As a result, loyalty marketing managers can analyze member segments, identify which promotions to run and which members to target, and measure promotion effectiveness. Loyalty partner managers can analyze partner contributions to program success and measure joint promotion effectiveness. And executives can analyze loyalty program status, track budgets, evaluate membership trends and details, and summarize rewards 17
and redemption trends. With Oracle Loyalty Analytics, loyalty programs can be optimized to drive member behavior, build value, and reduce costs. Oracle Loyalty Analytics enables companies to effectively manage loyalty programs by allowing managers to See a complete picture of customer buying patterns, customer value, loyalty promotion effectiveness, liabilities, and customer behavior drivers Analyze the cost and revenue associated with the loyalty program as well as program liability Receive timely information on member accruals and redemptions sliced and diced by dimensions such as tier class/tier, customer geography, segment, or promotion Track member transactions and analyze members movements among tiers Evaluate partner performance within the loyalty program by analyzing the partner s contribution to the overall success of the program Figure 10. Dashboards in Oracle Loyalty Analytics highlight the revenues and liabilities associated with a customer loyalty program. Oracle Service Analytics Oracle Service Analytics allows companies to rigorously track and analyze key service center metrics including service request aging, service request resolution, and service activities per employee and take the appropriate action to maintain or improve performance. Customer service representatives (CSRs) can view the entire customer relationship; discover potential issues; and identify opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and improve customer satisfaction. The solution provides best-practice metrics, alerts, and reports that allow employees to make the best possible decisions. By providing powerful insight to analyze all aspects of service center 18
performance, Oracle Service Analytics can help deliver a best-in-class service center with satisfied customers, low operating costs, and high revenue per customer. In many cases, requests are time-critical, so we always want to be able to report on their status. As our Oracle analytical database grows, our service organization becomes more proactive by contacting customers to address issues before they become problems. Kurt Zimmer, Vice President of CRM Delivery, TIAA-CREF The solution enables companies to more effectively manage their service centers and improve business performance by Delivering insight directly to CSRs via their CRM application so they do not have to change screens to receive the latest information Providing a complete, real-time view of the customer account by drawing data from systems used by field sales and accounting so CSRs can quickly resolve issues, increase cross- and upselling, tailor service based on the customer value, and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty Tracking top KPIs for service initiatives such as service request aging, service request resolution, and service activities per employee so managers understand the factors driving service requests Allowing management to evaluate performance at the individual CSR and site level using metrics that include cost to serve, average resolution time, and contact profitability and compare results to both internal targets and external benchmarks Figure 11. Dashboards provide CSRs with a complete view of the customer account and allow management to track overall service center performance. 19
Oracle Call Center Telephony Analytics To provide a complete picture of contact center performance, Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics accesses information from Web servers, interactive voice response systems, automatic call distributors, and computer telephony integration systems as well as from CRM, financial, HR, and e-mail applications. When the key reasons behind operating trends are understood, managers and CSRs are able to increase customer satisfaction and retention, monitor channel usage and migration, improve CSR effectiveness, reduce employee turnover, and maximize productivity and resource utilization. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics allows companies to more effectively manage their contact centers and improve business performance by Tracking top KPIs for service initiatives, including first and final resolution, average speed of answer, average handle time, call abandonment rate, and service levels Allowing CSRs to direct customers to lower-cost service options such as IVR or self-service Web sites to address simple inquiries so they are free to focus on higher-value calls Tracking CSR transfer rates, revenue per CSR, average handle time, and time spent by a CSR on after-call work to help supervisors identify high-performing CSRs as well as those in need of additional training Integrating workforce management information generally not available in call center reports so management can determine how factors such as tenure, education, compensation, and training impact CSR turnover and performance Figure 12. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides a complete view of contact center performance. 20
Conclusion Most organizations collect and store a lot of data. However, the data is valuable only if it helps improve the quality of your organization s decisions. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Access data from multiple sources across your organization Present data via intuitive, understandable dashboards, reports, and alerts Deliver an enterprise view of performance By providing access to enterprisewide information in an easy-to-understand format, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications help business managers make better decisions that improve overall business performance. As the leading packaged analytic applications, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications also offer a rapid time to value, best practice-based functionality across eleven functional areas, and a single BI foundation for the enterprise. With Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, you can mine data for timely insights that can lead to smarter decisions, better plans, and more empowered workers. For more information on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, please visit oracle.com/goto/obia 21
An Overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications June 2009 Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 0609